I'd prefer to stick with something that just reads the logs on the server, so that I can track traffic even when people have disabled scripts in their browser, or if they've blacklisted google analytics.

In the past I've used awstats and webalyzer. I've read about piwik, but never tried it.

Anyone have any personal recommendations, love/hate stories, etc?

I use a combination of Awstats and Google Analytics. Together, they capture everything I need.

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The only one I've used is analog. It's pretty basic, but does all I need. It works from the Apache logs, so no Javascript, web bugs, or other silliness is required.